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> What exactly is the issue with proprietary drivers? They break. I have a GT730 card which came with my office PC. This card’s support has ended with the 470

> What exactly is the issue with proprietary drivers? They break. I have a GT730 card which came with my office PC. This card’s support has ended with the 470 driver series, which is one of last (if not the last) release for the previous generation of NVIDIA drivers. Now, the drivers still ship, and the kernel module is still maintained, but the surrounding GLX drivers are static. As the desktop Linux improves and moves forward, accelerated stuff tends to get migrated to newer technologies, or its GLX use is getting refined. This causes drivers to lose compatibility over time. This means more and more of your applications fail to start or break in mysterious ways. Also there’s Wayland support issue, which is the elephant in the room. I had to buy an AMD card which works better, because all the software ecosystem around that card is maintained by volunteers, and the card is architected for working with open drivers well. AMD redesigned its silicon to allow open drivers to work with every unit on the GPU without revealing sensitive information (like HDCP keys) while allowing open drivers to access video encoders and such on the card. After I got that card, all my problems have just vanished. So, I’ll never use an NVIDIA card on my computer for the foreseeable future.

c0pium 3y ago
Except the exact same thing happens with AMD and their open source drivers. There are tons of AMD cards that are perfectly fine for desktop usage and will absolutely not work under Linux. It comes down to a religious belief in open source, which is totally fine. But let’s be honest about what’s happening here.
- type0 3y ago
  > Except the exact same thing happens with AMD and their open source drivers. How so?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  If the drivers are in-tree, they should keep working indefinitely. What open source drivers are in Linux and stopped working over time?
  - paulmd 3y ago
    mach64 and r128, both widely used in mid-2000s servers/ILOM
heavyset_go 3y ago
I have several laptops with Nvidia graphics that can't run proprietary drivers because not only has Nvidia deprecated the drivers, no platforms even package them anymore, while newer drivers exist in distributions' package repositories. So you can end up in a situation where you've installed proprietary drivers via package manager and then a year later the packages are gone entirely. You're forced to use PPAs that don't work or packages on the AUR which also don't work, and you're restricted to distributions that support either 3rd party packaging solution if don't want to install things manually, which also doesn't work.
stqism 3y ago
In fairness, the GT 730 will reach 10 years old in only 6 more months and loses performance wise to even older laptop iGPUs by a decent margin. The card alone is years past the age range GPUs “typically fail”, even Windows has long dropped support for it. Expecting even open source volunteers to maintain support for every old GPU while continuously improving the drivers and adding more functionality and fixes is a bit much.
- RaisingSpear 3y ago
  I can run current Linux distros on 15 year old hardware without issue. If the vendor wants to drop support earlier, that's up to them, but it's a reason why people want open drivers. Also, local stores around me still sell new GT 710s. Probably has something to do with Nvidia not making any low end GPUs since. > Expecting even open source volunteers to maintain support for every old GPU The great thing about open source is that anyone can fork the code and maintain support themselves. You don't get that option with proprietary drivers.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  Doesn't matter. Its performance was enough for what I needed from my computer until some of the applications started to break. I have now replaced it with a Radeon RX550, which is 6.5 years old at this point, and works with open drivers like a charm, and amongst other things, I can integrate its power and utilization related data into my system dashboard very easily, because the drivers provide the relevant sensor access. Also, it works way smoother without finicky VSync and other small paper cuts. Current, modern amdgpu driver supports cards which are 10 years old at this point. radeon kernel module supports cards even older than that, and this module is still updated, tuned up and fixed. So, while AMD was the underdog, they managed to redesign their chips and restart a community and an independent department to develop and support open source drivers only. I think NVIDIA can do that, too, if they can be bothered, but alas, they don't care.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    RX 550 windows support is being dropped by AMD as well. Linux community support will continue but at some point official support does end for these things. https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-confirms-polaris-and-vega-architectures-will-only-to-receive-critical-updates-going-forward https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-confirms-polaris-and-vega-ar... Obviously having an open driver is nice (and nvidia is upstreaming one) but AMD still doesn’t support consumer cards in ROCm in Linux, AMD still doesn’t support hdmi 2.1 in Linux, and there’s probably (different) business concerns for nvidia as well. Not everything can be opened up - again, see hdmi 2.1, which will probably continue to require closed releases due to licensing requirements. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417

c0pium 3y ago

Except the exact same thing happens with AMD and their open source drivers. There are tons of AMD cards that are perfectly fine for desktop usage and will absolutely not work under Linux. It comes down to a religious belief in open source, which is totally fine. But let’s be honest about what’s happening here.

type0 3y ago
> Except the exact same thing happens with AMD and their open source drivers. How so?
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
If the drivers are in-tree, they should keep working indefinitely. What open source drivers are in Linux and stopped working over time?
- paulmd 3y ago
  mach64 and r128, both widely used in mid-2000s servers/ILOM

heavyset_go 3y ago

I have several laptops with Nvidia graphics that can't run proprietary drivers because not only has Nvidia deprecated the drivers, no platforms even package them anymore, while newer drivers exist in distributions' package repositories. So you can end up in a situation where you've installed proprietary drivers via package manager and then a year later the packages are gone entirely. You're forced to use PPAs that don't work or packages on the AUR which also don't work, and you're restricted to distributions that support either 3rd party packaging solution if don't want to install things manually, which also doesn't work.

stqism 3y ago

In fairness, the GT 730 will reach 10 years old in only 6 more months and loses performance wise to even older laptop iGPUs by a decent margin. The card alone is years past the age range GPUs “typically fail”, even Windows has long dropped support for it. Expecting even open source volunteers to maintain support for every old GPU while continuously improving the drivers and adding more functionality and fixes is a bit much.

RaisingSpear 3y ago
I can run current Linux distros on 15 year old hardware without issue. If the vendor wants to drop support earlier, that's up to them, but it's a reason why people want open drivers. Also, local stores around me still sell new GT 710s. Probably has something to do with Nvidia not making any low end GPUs since. > Expecting even open source volunteers to maintain support for every old GPU The great thing about open source is that anyone can fork the code and maintain support themselves. You don't get that option with proprietary drivers.
bayindirh 3y ago
Doesn't matter. Its performance was enough for what I needed from my computer until some of the applications started to break. I have now replaced it with a Radeon RX550, which is 6.5 years old at this point, and works with open drivers like a charm, and amongst other things, I can integrate its power and utilization related data into my system dashboard very easily, because the drivers provide the relevant sensor access. Also, it works way smoother without finicky VSync and other small paper cuts. Current, modern amdgpu driver supports cards which are 10 years old at this point. radeon kernel module supports cards even older than that, and this module is still updated, tuned up and fixed. So, while AMD was the underdog, they managed to redesign their chips and restart a community and an independent department to develop and support open source drivers only. I think NVIDIA can do that, too, if they can be bothered, but alas, they don't care.
- paulmd 3y ago
  RX 550 windows support is being dropped by AMD as well. Linux community support will continue but at some point official support does end for these things. https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-confirms-polaris-and-vega-architectures-will-only-to-receive-critical-updates-going-forward https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-confirms-polaris-and-vega-ar... Obviously having an open driver is nice (and nvidia is upstreaming one) but AMD still doesn’t support consumer cards in ROCm in Linux, AMD still doesn’t support hdmi 2.1 in Linux, and there’s probably (different) business concerns for nvidia as well. Not everything can be opened up - again, see hdmi 2.1, which will probably continue to require closed releases due to licensing requirements. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417